I have been putting together some new coin binders and always include the mintages as part of the description. I notice that some mintages are very exact (e.g., 10,756,253) while others appear to be rounded numbers (10, 760, 000). Do either of these values represent actual mintages. If so, why does the precision vary from year to year, or from mint to mint within a year? One way suggests that they mint coins until they run out of something (planchets, time, etc.), while the other suggests a specific target mintage. Is it just a matter of record keeping, or do some mints actually mint odd numbers of coins? Any insights would be appreciated
In the early days of our mint, so many factors would halt their ability to produce coinage. My thought was that the mint would be in operation X amount of days, and based on the factors you mentioned (planchets, available dies etc.) they would produce however many coins they could in that given year. Afterward, they would report their mintages. But that's just my speculation, others may have a better response.
the odd numbers might just reflect the number of error coins that were destroyed-the original mintage being a round number